2013-06-05

How Not to Treat your Customers

I used to love group buying sites, but the deals have gotten considerably worse. My experience now is, if it looks too good to be true, it almost always is. That's ok, right? Businesses change. Industries change. We move on. And these emails are now unwanted clutter in my daily inbox.

Time to unsubscribe from the email flood, but I'm keen to can check back occasionally in case things improve.

This is where the Internet shines- it will be as easy as clicking a button. Or will it?!

LivingSocial is a good example of how things can go all wonky.

My first task was simply to log into my account, but the first thing I get is "we're sorry, we've been hacked... you'll need to reset your password. An email has been sent to you with instructions."

Well that's worrying.

After successfully resetting my password, I logged in with no further issues, and found the email preferences screen, and unsubscribed. I even filled out their nice form explaining why I was no longer interested in the service.

Ta da! Sorted.

Or perhaps not...the next two days I continue to get the daily email messages.

Argh! I login to recheck my account. Yep, my settings are still there...

Well clearly email unsubscribe is not working. We'll have to deal with this more painfully... I will just have to close & delete my account entirely.

WHAT NO DELETE OPTION?! Now that's just wrong.

Humph. Time to contact support, so let's click on the Help link at the bottom.

Ack!

I should note here that Firefox (my preferred browser) has an even more worrying message, in that it doesn't explain the details of the certificate failure as well. With the situation above, ok, I can see why the certificate failed, and I have confidence it will be ok. In Firefox I actually have to add a security exception in order to be allowed to access the site at all.